For contemporary aircraft, an avionics ‘platform’ consists of a variety of elements such as sensors, data concentrators, a data communications network, radio frequency sensors and communication equipment, computational elements, effectors, and graphical displays. These components must share information with other components over the data communications network.
Legacy incarnations of these platform elements are in the form of individual subsystem elements often referred to as “federated systems”. A federated system is an application-specific subsystem in a self-contained package having its own dedicated logic, processors, and input/output interfaces. Multiple and separated federated systems rely on common subsets of data sources, but lack the sharing of processing resources and interfaces among federated systems. A set of federated systems can be communicatively interconnected by utilizing separate data buses or a shared data network.
Network components utilized to construct the data network can utilize a specialized data protocol, including relays, switches, communicative connections, and the like, to ensure performance of the network architecture for the specialized data, as for example, under the performance of the network communications defined by the ARINC 664 part 7 specification.